A MEAL TO SAVOUR

Moroccan tagine, with preserved lemons and olives, is unforgettable

I tasted my first tagine when I was in my 20s. A newly minted New Yorker, I went out to dinner in Greenwich Village to a now-shuttered restaurant called Cookies and Couscous. While sitting by the window and sipping mint tea, my friend and I studied the menu, admired the tiny 20-seat space, and ordered tagines — lamb and chicken — and a bottle of Moroccan red wine.

We smelled our tagines before we saw them. The saffron, ginger, coriander and other spices were as delicious as they were aromatic. Served alongside couscous, it was an unforgettable meal.

Most associated with Morocco, tagine is the name of a dish as well as the vessel in which it is cooked. The latter has a circular base with low sides and a hat-like dome lid in which ingredients are slow-cooked or braised. Any heavy-bottomed pot of similar volume — a Dutch oven, for instance — will do the job.

Tagines — the dish — can be made with vegetables, poultry, meat or seafood.

The recipe featured here, adapted from San Francisco-based Moroccan chef Mourad Lahlou's cookbook, Mourad: New Moroccan (Artisan, 2011), uses chicken, as well as olives and preserved lemon. (Some recipes will tell you plain lemons are a fine substitute. Don't believe them. A fresh lemon will add brightness and acid, but the salty, briny notes imparted by preserved lemons cannot be replicated. Find them at well-stocked supermarkets or Middle Eastern markets.)

The word m'qualli in the recipe title, according to cookbook author Claudia Roden in her book Arabesque, denotes tagines “cooked in oil where there is saffron and ginger and the sauce is yellow.”